Friday, February 9, 2018

Stephen M. Lacy, executive chairman, Meredith Corp. and chairman, MPA – The Association of Magazine Media, welcomed attendees to AMMC and kicked off the conference with an acknowledgement to Meredith Corp.’s recent acquisition of Time Inc. He continued with an overview of the industry’s success in the past year. Linda Thomas Brooks, president and CEO of MPA, took the stage and encouraged attendees to follow the Dalai Lama’s advice: “Keep working on it.” Though there is no single approach that ensures success in the magazine media business, sharing thoughts, perspectives and data helps the industry become as innovative as possible.

Thank You to our strategic associate partners for their AMMC sponsorship support.

Celebrities, dogs and authoritarianism engage readers in the latest GfK MRI readership study: Entertainment titles were the top two print audience performers in October 2017, as measured by the latest GfK MRI’s Issue Specific (IS) Readership Study. People magazine’s Oct. 23 issue (IS audience: 54,763,000) featured the likeness of Chip and Joanna Gaines while delivering an “exclusive” on why the duo ended their television show, Fixer Uppers. It scored an IS index of 135. News that both Khloe and Kylie Kardashian are expecting graced the cover of the Oct. 9 In Touch (7,891,000) placing it close behind, with an IS score of 134.

In an article at Nieman Journalism Lab, “Learning from The New Yorker, Wired’s new paywall aims to build a more ‘stable financial future,’” Wired’s editor in chief Nick Thompson talks about the decision. Formerly the editor of NewYorker.com for seven years, where he helped put its paywall into place, he sees paywalls as an essential part of a publications survival.

Mr. Tonchi, an honoree at amfAR’s gala Wednesday, told Page Six: “Money can actually ruin your sense of fashion because invention is the mother of creativity. When you do not have money, you make what you have work, and you put together things. When you have money . . . you can pay a stylist to put up your look, and that is not cool.”

Masha Fedorova has been named editor in chief of Vogue Russia, while Ilyana Erdneeva will hold the title at Glamour Russia. Anita Gigovskaya, president of Condé Nast for the region, confirmed both appointments on Friday.

By uniquely aggregating an interconnected network of local content creators and established publishers onto a new, unified mobile-first medium (vs. fragmented print, tv, radio and desktop web), our location-based platform will empower them to leverage the network effects of aggregated local audiences. This, in turn, will allow publishers to attract a broader population of local and national advertisers in ways never accessible before. Moreover, in light of the ongoing unpredictable, self-serving actions by the mainstream social platforms, the time is right for branded media to move forward with an owned and operated mobile-first model, and Relevnt presents that low-cost, agnostic ecosystem.

Subscription revenue for The New York Times Company increased 19.2%, due to growth in subscriptions to digital-only products like Cooking and Crosswords in fourth-quarter 2017. Digital subscription revenue increased by more than $100 million year-over-year, which represented 60% of total revenue for The New York Times Company in 2017.

Calling Out a Magazine for Body Shaming Changed Nina Agdal's Career: "I'm Being Very Selective"

The Danish model, 25, was set to appear on the cover of Venice Ft. Lauderdale magazine after doing a lengthy shoot with them, but Agdal revealed on Instagram that the magazine refused to run the images because they claimed she didn’t fit into the sample size clothing and believed the photos “did not reflect well on my talent,” she said in January.

MPA Magazine Media Spotlight: The Glory Days of The Face, and the Magic of Old Magazines

The nineties, as middle-aged people such as myself are fond of recounting, was an era when it was harder than it is now to find cool things. It is easy to romanticize the labor it took, back then, to hunt down moderately obscure music, movies, or books—to see it, in retrospect, as a character-building experience. At the time, it was just annoying. But, in those years, even dull suburbs sometimes had bookstores with interesting magazines. (The one in my town was called A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books.) And magazines provided comprehensible glimpses into the vast elsewhere. When I discovered a new one, I read every word, including the ads, because a good magazine communicated a coherent sensibility, an intoxicating jumble of ideas, images, and things to buy.

the New York Times style magazine, T, goes live online with a new look and feel, thanks to its new editor-in-chief, Hanya Yanagihara. The issue will hit doorsteps of all Sunday Times subscribers on February 18. Yanagihara is a novelist, travel writer, and editor born in Los Angeles.

Publishers and Brands Are Copying Snapchat’s Story Feature for Their Apps and Mobile Sites

Brands like Virgin and publishers like Food Network, Entertainment Weekly, People and Dictionary.com are adding sections to their apps called Stories. These Stories aren’t designed for people to share but rather for brands and publishers to share their own content, mostly vertical video, made popular by Snapchat’s Discover section.